trying for years to unscramble them."

"Why certainly," the Chief said, so positively I knew he hadn't heard
of it before.

"Anyway," Kenzie said. "The more we worked out the vocabulary code,
the more the star signals began to fit right into it. So we decided to
break up the thing, and forget all about ants. Honest Chief, you'll
never hear me mention the word again."

"Termites either," Pringle chimed in.

"But I still don't understand," the Chief complained. "It still all
sounds marvelous. I just don't understand."

"Draw him a picture," Pringle said disgustedly.

"Okay," Kenzie acceded. "How many years would you say ants have been
on earth, Chief?"

"Oh, I don't know," the Chief answered. "Quite a few, I'd say."

"Yeah," Kenzie said drily. "Quite a few. At least a million.
Unchanged. A perfect life form with a perfect civilization. So
perfect, nature hasn't seen any need to change them for a million
years."

"So what?" the Chief asked. "They're nothing. We come along and make
them do nip ups."

"Yeah," Kenzie was bitter again. "We humans go around talking about
how brave and smart we are. How someday we might even get so smart
we'll contact other intelligent races on other worlds. Yeah, we're
smart. You know those star radiations?"

"That's not my specialty, you know," the Chief answered cautiously.

"Some of those radiations started out from their home planet a million
_light_ years ago," Pringle said quietly.

"So what again?" the Chief asked.

"Those radiations," Kenzie said, "happen to be communications between
the galaxies--beamed at the ants. Sort of a continuous radio program
broadcast universe wide. It happens the ants, maybe termites, maybe
other insects, are spread through all the galaxies. It happens _they_
are the dominant intelligent race throughout the universe." He
shrugged in disgust.

"Us big brave humans," he said contemptuously. "Someday we might even
reach Mars. Hell, those ants have been colonizing for hundreds of
millions of years. They're still communicating. They are the real
intelligence on the earth!"

He crushed a cigarette fiercely into a glass ash tray on the desk.

"Only thing man has got, or ever had, was his ego. He's got to believe
he's top dog, or else he folds and quits. Yeah, we're smart all right.
Hell, we're so far down the scale the ants don't even recognize us as
a life form at all."

Pringle nodded soberly. "Yeah," he said to the Chief, "how would you